The communications industry is rapidly changing to adjust to emerging technologies and ever increasing customer demand. This customer demand for new applications and increased performance of existing applications is driving communications network and system providers to employ networks and systems having greater speed and capacity (e.g., greater bandwidth). In trying to achieve these goals, a common approach taken by many communications providers is to use packet switching technology. Increasingly, public and private communications networks are being built and expanded using various packet technologies, such as Internet Protocol (IP). Note, nothing described or referenced in this document is admitted as prior art to this application unless explicitly so stated.
Associative memories, especially ternary content-addressable memories (TCAMs), are currently used in packet switching devices in the processing of packets, including routing (e.g., finding a longest matching prefix) and access control (e.g., finding entries matching access control list (ACL) entries). Representing a prefix (or a fully specified value) in an TCAM requires a single entry, but representing a range of values (e.g., port 50-80) or other operations (e.g., less than 50, not equal to 10) can require a large number of TCAM entries.